Escape Room - Samurai Castle

Escape Room - Samurai Castle is a mystery puzzle adventure for adults: a Japanese escape room set in an abandoned samurai castle. The gate is locked, the banners hang bare, and the clan that lived here is gone. Find the clues, open forty locks across four acts, and follow the clan into the mountain, back up the keep by night and out along the pale road.

You arrive at dusk. Weeds split the flagstones of the courtyard. In the dojo every blade is gone from the rack, taken in order, without haste, and the footprints in the dust all walk one way: toward the keep. High in the keep a lamp moves past a window, though no one should be there. Behind the empty dais a narrow stair leads down, and at its foot hundreds of straw sandals stand in rows.

Four acts, fifty-one painted rooms
• Act I, The Outer Wards: from the Castle Gate to the Keep Hall.
• Act II, The Vow Beneath: from the Hall of Sandals to the Heart of the mountain.
• Act III, The Keeper Above: back up the keep at night, across the nightingale floor, to the lamp in the high window. Two endings: keep the vigil, or let the lamp go out.
• Act IV, The Pale Road: out past the gate at dusk, down the road the clan's guard walked, to a mountain shrine where something breathes.
• A point and click castle escape in first person. Rooms change as you play: doors stand open, the cistern drains, the shrine lamps catch.

The castle gate
• Every visit begins at the gate, on a painting of the room you left. One tap walks you back in.
• The act strip shows all four acts and the locks left in each. Tap an act to go there.
• Play, Map, Daily, Shop and More wait in the menu along the bottom. Step into a room and it gives the painting the whole screen.

Forty locks, many kinds of puzzle
• Code locks, banner levers, star wheels, and moon mirrors that throw light across the floor.
• Hands-on mechanisms: an altar that opens like a karakuri box, rings that turn each other, an armour chest of sliding lacquer panels.
• Ferry a load over the river without sinking the boat, weigh steel on a smith's balance, read four swords by their temper lines.
• Every answer is in the castle: a verse on a stone placard, a lamp-keeper's note, a diary's last page.

A mystery at your own pace
• The clue journal keeps every clue you read, with a picture of where you found it.
• No enemies, no way to lose and no dead ends. The game saves after every move.

Hints for every lock
• Three steps for every lock: a nudge, the method, then the answer.
• The nudge costs nothing, and your first 10 methods and answers are on the house. After that they cost koban you earn by opening locks.
• Short of koban? You pay what you have, and the castle covers the rest.

Trials, crests and a daily riddle
• Race a finished act against the clock in the Trial of the Hour. Most locks change every run.
• Find the hidden clan crests, five in every act, and hang the clan's masks on the Mask Wall.
• A new riddle every day. Every lock pays koban as you rise from Ashigaru through the samurai ranks.

The Storehouse
• Act I is a complete chapter. Seal it and the castle gives you a journal cover, and the first room of every later act opens. The rest of each act unlocks in story order, with koban earned in play or a one-time purchase.
• Journal covers and lantern lights you can try in any room first, and Night Watch: every room of every act by moonlight.
• The Collector's Edition: the Keeper's Chronicle of every act you seal, and every room as a wallpaper.
• Seal an act without a single hint to earn the Master's Lantern.

For grown-ups
A slow, eerie Japanese escape game for adults who like to look closely. The rooms are dark and the story is unsettling, but nothing jumps out at you and there is no violence. The clan did not flee and did not fight. They kept a vow, one lamp at a time, and someone kept it for them.

The gate is waiting. Listen to the silence.